Dan calls to the Barred Owl during Owl Prowl
Here is a bit of trivia that is going make quite a few of us seem old; Owl Moon by Jane Yolen was written thirty five years ago. While I'm not feeling particularly old, being older seems to be an ongoing theme with me lately. For example, I offered up my Snow Lion sleeping bag to Kayden who searched online and found its corresponding 1970 catalogue. Ugh! What was I doing with a 52 year old sleeping bag? Because I distinctly remember getting that bag closer to the 80s, I convinced myself to feel better about owning a 42 year old bag. What? It's still in good shape. Just to pile on the mothballs, this week a kindergartner asked me, "Mrs. Manning, were you alive in the 90s?" while another observed that the Classical music her teacher was playing was in fact, "Valentine's noise." I quickly informed the group that Chopin was my favorite. What was I thinking?
In the early weeks of February, the Kindergarten science unit is adaptation. The classrooms fill with sciencey books on animals along with five and six year old fact loving reporters, "Mrs. Manning where is Australia? Do you know what these tracks are from?" Idk, Opossum? To which the small scientist gleefully laughs and announces, "No, a Kangaroo!" Well then, I guess I should have payed better attention to our classes' Bonnyvale Environmental Center winter animal tracking lesson. Each year Seth brings in his collection of hides, pelts, antlers, claws, teeth and bones for the children to closely examine. The students create art, role play, compare penguins and they become authors and illustrators. But my favorite time spent is reading aloud books like Jan Brett's The Mitten and of course Owl Moon. I'm all for tapping in on the facts of life; but these children still retain a contagious, glorious sense of wonder that infects even the most sensible. I find that as I grow older, I too am increasingly stirred by the intersection of what is and what might be.
Call it hope, call it romance, or call it science; January into February is for lovers: Lovers of the new year, lovers of snow, lovers of equality, justice, freedom and history. It's also for lover's of spring like Punxsutawney Phil, and gardeners who receive seed catalogues in the mail, lovers of football, of the outrageous like Squirrel Appreciation Day, love with a purpose and love for the sake of love.
"Great Horned Owls are our most common owl but they have gone silent. They have laid their eggs and the female is on the nest. Sometimes we can hear the male; but the female doesn't want to attract predators to the nest and goes silent. The eggs are laid so that the owls hatch and leave the nest when the rabbits are being born The male brings baby rabbits to them to teach them to hunt rabbit." -Dan
I look around the small group, there are couples like Wayne and I, an older single person and what looks to be a young teenager and her mother. Thanks to the kindness of Christine who gifted us her tickets, Wayne and I are at the Hitchcock Center in Amherst MA for the Owl Prowl. It's 7:30 pm the Saturday before Valentines Day and I am having second thoughts about being in the city until 10:30 at night. I mean, at that hour, even the college kids have gone home for the evening.
Leading up to this weekend our local Vernon Vermont Facebook page had begun to fill up with Martin's account of huge flocks of Gold Finch at Vernon's bird feeders, Bethany's fox sighting, Ali's Piliated, Karla's mystery snow track, Jason's bobcat, Matt's videos of a Redtail Hawk eating gray squirrels, Paul Miller's amazing Snowy Owl at the farm, Diane's flowers and Ed Sr's stunning bluebirds.
"We're from Vernon, VT" was met with some confusion. "The south-eastern most town in VT" didn't seem to clarify things much and who on earth, I thought to myself, leaves VT to see owls in the city anyway? "We had a Snowy Owl sighting" I offered, and with that Dan relieved my discomfort by informing the group that there is currently a Snowy Owl invasion mostly in the Midwest due to an abundance of food. With that I showed everyone Paul's photograph.
Now I could fill this page in with all sorts of information about owls that Dan shared with us, like the fact that Great Horned Owls nest in old Red Tailed Hawk's and crow nests. I could even share my own accounts of the owls that have visited our yard right here in Vernon and the owls that we saw and heard on the Owl Prowl; but what I really want you to understand is that owls are for lovers.
Owls are for a teenage girl, who every time she saw an owl, grabbed her mom's elbows and exclaimed, "Aren't they cute!" Owls are for a grown man who tells a group of strangers that he has been calling owls since he was a kid and that last nights group had twenty mile an hour winds and they didn't see a single owl. Owls are for children who cut and paste together owls at school and then color them in with rainbows. Owls are for Wayne who practiced his Barred Owl call for the duration of our hike in the town forest this afternoon and then presented to me hot cocoa in a VT owl mug! And owls are for my Palentine Christine who gave up her chance to prowl for owls because she knew that Wayne and I love doing things like this.
But if by chance, owls really aren't your thing, then perhaps tracking bears (?) in the town forest is.
Wonderful read.
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